Source: United States House of Representatives – Rep Ro Khanna (CA-17)
In Defense of the Courts and the University
Rep. Ro Khanna | Yale Law School | 4.15.25
My return today is not one of nostalgia for good pizza or to relive faded dreams. I chose to come to Yale at a serious moment in the life of our Republic because the Woodward Report, issued by this very institution in 1974, defines the paramount duty of the American university: the defense of free expression and free inquiry.
There are moments in a mature democracy — dating as far back as the prosecution of Socrates — when institutions must stand firm as guardians of free thought against the roar of the crowd.
This is such a moment.
In our nation, a mobocratic spirit — fanned by amoral, ambitious men — threatens not only our constitutional way of life but freedom of thought itself. For generations, American power has been checked by the Constitution and the quiet strength of reasoned debate. Politicians have bowed to the courts and stood before the people — not to silence opposition, but to answer it.
But today, a great anger grips the public — burned by years of war, wearied by economic stagnation, and fearful that the foreign-born among us now comprise a larger share of our population than at any point in a century. From this disquiet rises not a call to reform, but to dismantle — to cast off the judges in their robes, the scholars in their gowns, and the press with its inconvenient questions.
And at the head of this gathering storm stands JD Vance — calling on the President to defy the Supreme Court, and casting universities like Yale, his alma mater and mine, as the enemy.
He claims that you here at Yale are being corrupted — taught to reject American values — as if he alone possesses the authority to define what it means to be an American, as if the life of the mind is to be excised from our nation’s story. How far we have fallen from the days when Thomas Jefferson chose not to list the presidency on his epitaph, but instead the founding of a university.
Jefferson understood that the life of the mind is as vital to liberty as the laws we live by, and that an educated citizenry is essential for democracy to thrive.
Now, I remember they don’t teach much black letter law at Yale. But the President must obey court orders is about as basic as it gets. Our whole system depends on the idea that the Constitution gives the courts the power to say what the law is in any given case. In Cooper versus Aaron, the Court held that the “Constitution is the supreme law of the land,” and when specific disputes arise, the judiciary gets to decide what the law requires. In Youngstown, the Court made it clear that President Truman was limited by the Constitution and could not seize steel mills for our national defense during the Korean war because Congress did not give him that power.
This check on executive power has not only kept the President from becoming a king — it is what has made America the most innovative and dynamic free enterprise economy in the world. We saw the fiasco of a President imposing tariffs on a whim. But imagine if he could go further: launch investigations into companies he disliked, void contracts to punish rivals, deport an immigrant business leader for political gain, or pull funding from scientists and scholars who challenge convention.
Those who complain that America suffers from too much regulation certainly would not want the system to be replaced with arbitrary decision making by the state. The United States has been successful because the predictability and stability the rule of law provides for long term economic investment. Unlike other nations, our business leaders do not have to worry about capricious rule changes that benefit political elites or worry about their assets being seized.
And yet, every day that Vance tweets of defying court orders, he chips away at that trust — the invisible thread that binds our economic, social, and political life. Most recently, he defended the deportation of Abrego Garcia to a notorious Salvadoran prison — even after his own administration called it an “administrative error”. When Americans asked for due process, he answered not with reason, but with feigned rage — accusing us of sympathy for a gang member. Nine Supreme Court justices firmly rejected his claim that Abrego had no legal right to be here.
To stir up public fury by painting due process as weakness is a timeless danger. Lincoln saw it clearly. In his Lyceum Address, he warned against mob vengeance, saying:
“When men take it in their heads to hang gamblers or burn murderers, they should recollect that… they will be as likely to hang someone who is neither a gambler nor a murderer.”
Without due process, Vance is as likely to destroy the life of an innocent man as he is to punish the guilty. And he does not seem to care. But Lincoln cared. He warned:
“The innocent… fall victims to the ravages of mob law, and thus it goes on, step by step, till all the walls erected for the defense of the persons and property of individuals, are trodden down, and disregarded.”
We have been fortunate in our history to have leaders — like Lincoln — who appealed not to fury, but to reason. But we’ve also seen leaders, like Vance, who win public adulation by stoking anger and treating legal limits as nuisances to be ignored. Lincoln’s path is harder, slower — but it is truer to our founding, as it defends the sacred right of the individual over the exercise of impulsive power.
Now, Vance says the President, elected by the people, should tell the Court what the Constitution means — and if the Court disagrees, let them try to enforce their ruling. That the President, as a co-equal, may simply ignore the Court’s judgment of the law.
In Vance’s America, the police can knock on any immigrant’s door, deport him to a dictatorship without due process, and then wash their hands of his fate, pretending that America is powerless to free someone outside our border. They did this with Abrego. They did this with Merwil Gutierrez, a 19 year old Venezuelan, who may have had no criminal record and whose heartbroken father is searching for him in vain . JD Vance, your cold indifference to the lives of vulnerable immigrants mocks every principle that this law school was built to uphold.
Your affiliation with this law school is now a stain on the degree of every Yale graduate. I hope Yalies –alumni, student, faculty and administrators will have the moral clarity to say so plainly.
But what about Vance’s argument that courts can be wrong?
Here again, Lincoln teaches us. He did not accept the abhorrent Dred Scott decision as the final word, recognizing that the decision was destined to be overturned, not through blanket defiance of the judiciary, but through a legal crusade for equality. Lincoln’s reverence for the law did not weaken his moral clarity — it deepened it. He showed that his cause was not mere personal conviction, but rooted in the values and documents etched into the nation’s character. He pursued it through argument, elections, legislation, and new judicial appointments. He didn’t trample the Constitution in the name of justice — he worked through the Constitution to achieve justice.
And so must we.
In our system, there is no Executive sovereignty. No Congressional sovereignty. No Judicial sovereignty. There is only popular sovereignty. The people ultimately decide what the Constitution means and what our laws should be. But that power is channeled through a constitutional framework — where the popular will must express itself through an intricate and deliberate system of elections, legislation, court decisions, appointments, and amendments. When Vance urges the President to defy that framework in the name of a false populism, he does not honor the people’s will — he undermines it. Ours is not a system of brute majoritarianism, but of constitutional self-government. To abandon that is a radical rejection of the very design of the American experiment.
Vance has not only declared war on the courts — but on the universities. And it is no accident. As Stephen Kotkin observed in his study of Stalin, strongmen do not fear recessions or even failed wars as much as they fear the university. The greatest threat to consolidating power is not resistance — it is alternatives. Vance calls the university the enemy because he knows what lives here: historians, economists, law professors, and scientists who threaten him not with force, but with ideas.
Why else propose raising the endowment tax from 1.4 to 35%, if not from a deep fear that the ideas presented in lecture halls may take root in the hearts of a new generation? That young Americans might see a nation not of grievance, but of promise. That is what Vance fears most—not rebellion, but the birth of new thinking.
If ever there were a moment in our nation’s history for the defense of liberalism — as a defense of free thought and the examined life — it is now. Those who sneer at our universities — who mock thinking, learning, and degrees for cheap applause while credentialing themselves — are engaged in rank hypocrisy. They are gatekeepers of privilege, dissuading their fellow citizens from pursuing for their families the very opportunities they seek for their own children.
I hope university presidents will find their voice, pledging mutual support to each other, by remembering leaders like Yale’s Kingman Brewster, who stood with student protestors even when donors withdrew their support; Harvard’s James Conant, who resisted McCarthyism in the face of pressure from government and alumni; and Chicago’s Robert Hutchins, who defended the independence of scholarship against the demands of powerful business interests. Their place in history was not secured by the size of the endowment they left behind, but by the ideals they refused to abandon.
President Garber, you’ve shown courage in standing up to the bullies in the White House. I have no doubt that Harvard—with its legacy of liberty predating the founding of our nation—will prevail over the fleeting ignorance of our time.
President McInnis, I hope you will follow his lead.
And let Brewster, Conan, Hutchins, and Garber be an example for each of you. When a student is snatched from campus and denied due process, speak up. When a student protestor is harassed for their viewpoint, stand in their defense. When you are told to keep silent about the need for diversity by a potential employer, walk away.
Each of us must ask: What, in this hour, are we willing to risk? What is needed is not the towering courage of a Socrates, nor even of my grandfather, who spent four years in jail as part of Gandhi’s movement for Indian independence. What is needed now are the small acts of conscience that together shape the soul of a nation.
We may not have been able to save the deportation of Abrego or Gutierrez, but the louder we speak, the more of us who speak, the longer we speak, the more we become a human shield against an arbitrary state and resist the cold routinization of injustice. This is the time to stand up for a free society.
As for me, I have called out the richest man in the world, who responded by declaring on X that my career is over. I have called out J.D. Vance, who said I was a whiny congressman who disgusts him. But I have no regret.
In speaking out, we can find direction not only from Woodward’s report celebrating free expression but also from his seminal work on the history of segregation, which Dr. King called the “bible of the civil rights movement.” Woodward reminded us that the path to Jim Crow was not inevitable. What was true of the 1890s is true today. To paraphrase Woodward: “There are still real choices to be made, and alternatives to the course that now threatens us are still available”.
In times of crisis, this nation has often cast aside the old guard and turned to a new generation for new paths. That we were fortunate to witness Lincoln’s unlikely rise in our darkest hour is perhaps the strongest evidence of providence. The fate of liberal democracy now rests not only with those of us in Congress — it rests with you. It rests on whether you will rise to history’s call.
I believe you will.